Teenage Creativity and Problem-Solving
On a stormy evening in Johannesburg, a teacher logs on and a French teenager in Strasbourg answers from a bedroom scattered with sketchbooks and scout gear. Across continents and time zones, the talk finds its natural center: creativity—not as a museum piece, but as a living muscle that warms the room, solves everyday problems, and dares us to imagine something kinder than routine.
We begin with a travel plan. Bremen this month. The Canary Islands next year. A homestay with a German girl who doesn’t speaks French; they’ll use English to meet in the middle. Between suitcases and homework, there’s a poetry ribbon won last spring, a calligraphy pen too expensive to have bought but perfect as a prize, and a wish to try ceramics in a café where bowls are painted at the table. The teenager doesn’t mistake creativity for perfection. “When it’s messy, I can express what I feel,” she says, apologizing for the delay in the audio as the Wi-Fi bumps. Creativity is not tidy; it is a house where many rooms are lit at once.
The Case for Messy Brilliance
Creativity, the teenager offers, is ideas turning into something new: a drawing, a poem, a plan that solves a real problem. It’s also a way of clearing the mind—journaling the heaviness until the page absorbs what the heart can’t keep holding. “When you keep all the negative things in your head,” she says, “you become miserable. Writing lets you forget a little.” Her scouts skills translate the feeling into action: build with what’s at hand, work calmly, learn to live alongside others. Problem-solving is an art form that uses wood, rope, and patience.
Across the table, the teacher reframes: Creativity is intelligence having fun. That old line attributed to Einstein lands softly, less as a maxim than a permission slip. Think da Vinci—anatomist, dreamer of wings—whose sketches made science feel like a diary and engineering look like a moonlit poem. In this room, “smartness” isn’t brittle or competitive; it’s playful, quick to laugh, the kind that invites others in.
The Ripple Effect (and a Pink Sky)
“Imagination smells like cotton candy,” the teenager says. The table lights up. Cotton candy: childhood in a sentence. Does imagination belong only to kids? She smiles. No—but that’s how we picture it. A sweet spun from air, dissolving into nothing and yet somehow everything. When asked what color creativity would be, she chooses pink—energetic, heart-forward—as if the feeling had turned into a sky you could walk under.
The teacher brings in a cinematic cue—a boy in a film trying to be abducted by aliens—and suddenly the room has a new map. If ideas had wings, where would they fly first? “To space,” the teenager says, “because good ideas want to be on top.” The audacity of that line: good ideas don’t loiter; they climb. They leave the atmosphere. They search for a vantage point where problems shrink into puzzles and puzzles become play.
Structured or Freeform? The Switch We Try to Find
The teenager has a quiet thesis: life wants structure; creativity wants weather. In school she needs timetables. In art she prefers the messy house, every room mid-project. “If I had a creativity switch,” she confesses, “I’d turn it off at school and on at home.” Not because learning bores her, but because ideas arrive like guests who never knock. They come in singing, they ask for snacks, they pull out the good markers.
We pause on that image: a switch we keep looking for—on the desk, in the soul, behind the ear maybe. We don’t find it. Instead we find habits. Journaling is a switch. A walk around the block is a switch. Washing dishes, cyclists say, is a switch. Scouts’ knots, tea brewed correctly, a 20-minute nap. No instant magic. Just rituals that invite the muse to see we’re serious.
Here the group loops back to learning. Is creativity teachable? “Of course,” says the teacher. “Like a language or a recipe.” In France, the teenager explains, art classes punctuate school years, and even the absence of a class can spark self-teaching. YouTube tutorials, borrowed brushes, a café that lets you glaze a bowl for the price of a latte. Some things are pricey, yes, but there are doorways if you look. The poetry contest was a doorway; she walked through and walked out with a ribbon and a pen that feels heavy in the hand and light in the heart.
When Art Solves Instead of Describes
We test a distinction that arrives like a shy guest and then dominates the party: artistic versus creative. The teenager’s take is unsentimental. An artist studies technique, invests in materials, aims for mastery; creativity, as she uses it, is closer to personal truth-telling and practical magic. The artist might paint the problem; the creative person might fix the leaky tap and write a haiku about the drip.
If “artistic” intimidates you, relabel the work: I’m not painting; I’m problem-solving with color. I’m not composing; I’m arranging sound until it feels like weather I can live under.
The Community We Build When We Show Our Work
Call it the ripple effect of imagination. Posters on a school wall invited a poem; the poem entered a contest; the contest gave a pen; the pen writes new entries that nudge a friend to try ceramics; the bowls will be painted in a café; someone at the next table will ask about the glaze and go home to look for brushes. Creativity is contagious like laughter, like a yawn, like the impulse to dance when a song you loved at nineteen sneaks onto the playlist.
Social media complicates and amplifies the ripple. The teenager describes seeing a girl her age painting online and feeling the tug: I want to try that. The teacher smiles and admits to the same tug when watching a video of handmade soap—colors layered like geology, a ribbon of glitter through the center. “Maybe I’m too old to be fascinated,” she laughs, “but I want to try it.” The table votes: no one is too old for glitter. Or for learning. Or for the small, brave doings that turn a page into a practice.
When Imagination Whispers: Slow Down
We ask imagination to speak directly. What would it say to you, right now? The teenager doesn’t hesitate: Slow down. Not because ambition is wrong, but because overload is loud. She knows the feeling—body ready for sleep, mind refusing the off switch. “I think about everything,” she says, “what to wear, the sun, the color pink.” The room nods; insomnia is a language we all speak. Creativity can be both the cure and the culprit. It wakes us at three a.m. with an idea that feels like a gift and a prank—delightful, inconvenient, necessary.
The Hat That Holds Our Ideas
Before we close, there’s a detour we can’t resist: What hat would a creative person wear to show their idea?
The teenager votes for a giant Mexican sombrero—room for the whole wild sky. The teacher invokes the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter—a little opinionated, very honest. Someone mentions the Mad Hatter’s top hat from Alice in Wonderland, stitched with mischief. We stack them on the table like bright metaphors and feel the room tilt toward ceremony. Maybe hats are how we agree to take play seriously—to put on an identity for an hour and let it work on us.
Because in the end, that’s what this conversation is: a temporary hat, a soft uniform for the brave work of seeing anew. We came in with storms and schedules and left with a portable weather system: a way to make pink skies and cotton-candy air even on ordinary Tuesdays.
Closing the Loop: Create your own season
The clock says we’re done, but no one gets up quite yet. There’s always one more question: When did we stop playing just to play? Maybe we never did; maybe we only forgot. The teenager is headed to Bremen with a suitcase of small courage—language to negotiate, a new family to meet, a house where English will be the bridge. She’ll come back different in ways too subtle to post. The teacher will grade papers, stir a pot, browse a tutorial for making soap.
What if that’s our work, then—not to chase a constant harvest, but to make a season wherever we are? What if the switch we wanted was always a ritual away? What would your summer look like today—pink sky, cotton-candy air, a hat big enough to hold your next idea?
